BrandMuscle’s analysis of its own customer base shows that co-op support is not aligned with digital and social media marketing. Nearly 60% of them manage their marketing themselves, though their digital efforts are more effective if they outsource management to agencies or vendors.

My look at some local coverage of the election offers encouraging clues to how good journalism can have a positive impact on the business models for local news. It also implies that the coming Trump era is very likely to accelerate the industry’s transformation.

Social networks are transformative, and are the most disruptive when they provide a market segment with opportunities previously unavailable. If you look at the history of how selling has traditionally been done, it’s evident that social will transform sales as well.

In a world of omnichannel search, a business’s social media spaces are places where consumers can find what brands have to offer at a local level. As consumers search across a larger palette of devices and channels such as social, a brand needs to view its social spaces as battlegrounds for prompted search.

Apple’s relative inaction on VR/AR thus far could either indicate that the company is missing this next tech shift (which I’ve speculated), or that it’s playing the long game. The latter could involve a deliberately late entrance to VR and AR, just as it did with previous technologies.

Snapchat may be considered by many to be “the next Facebook,” but its approach to social media and interactions couldn’t be more different. From its emphasis on moments to the uneasiness the founders have with ad personalization, the company is certain to blaze a trail all its own the the local space.

Seeing their very survival at stake, local news sites are starting to revamp their models and sometimes scrap them for new ones. Some of the best of what’s happening in the besieged industry was put on display at the recent “Sustain Local 2016” conference.

Somewhere in the nascent days of flip-phones, when I headed up AOL’s mobile products division, we came across a little company with an ambitious goal: let people hail a cab or black car virtually using their cellphones. The company, Qsent, had been working on a mobile-phone version of a service called iQtaxi.